


Some Velvet Morning

by rufusrant



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, Sirius Black-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29256465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufusrant/pseuds/rufusrant
Summary: Sirius, only a prince, ventures into the woods and the world outside in search of a cure for his brother. The woods have other plans.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 10
Kudos: 24
Collections: RS Fireside Tales Vol.3





	Some Velvet Morning

**Author's Note:**

> "The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human."  
> -Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
> 
> Edit: since I am now revealed, I wanna thank mods luminousgloom and museinabsentia for running such a wonderful event! And include the link to the [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2rfZdqinIA&ab_channel=NancySinatra-Topic) that this story is named after.

Once, on a plain of rancid darkness and trees, stood a castle so white and smooth it was rumoured to be made from bone. In it lived a fearsome King and Queen, both reared in the very castle as cousins. They had two sons, born a respectable two years apart, and shortly after left them both to the care of the servants and the company of each other.

The brothers were each other's best friend. They navigated the halls of their home with linked arms, the other closed around a lantern each. Two years was a paltry sum of time. If you stood from afar the brothers easily looked like twins, born together- the same grey eyes, snow pale skin, hair as Black as their names. Only a few inches of height separated one from the other.

Another way was to hear their voices tumbling out. Sirius, the older, talked quickly and so gleefully he sounded like he was always amused. Very often he was in trouble for laughing at things he wasn't supposed to. Regulus, the younger, spoke slower but clearer. As he grew up his height eventually matched Sirius' and he knew exactly how much to drink; how much to laugh at a joke and what anecdotes to say at dinners with important guests. He was allowed to sit next to their father the King while Sirius drunkenly speared plum pudding down the table.

The King and Queen were marrying Sirius off. He did not know, and no one bothered to tell him— except his valet, Frank. At the news Sirius turned less and less into a prince. His hair outgrew Regulus' wavy crop, flowed long and swift like a stroke of Chinese ink. He grew strong from helping dig holes for trees in the gardens and from duelling with the knights. But most of all he plotted to run away. He climbed the trees he planted, high as he could go, to scout where the edge of the forest was. He went riding and hunting from dusk till dawn while making maps with parchment and quills to plan an escape. He sat in the trees drawing with calm, while Frank pleaded at his feet to come down and return for supper. 

Regulus usually watched from the window, over the tops of his books. If Sirius were gone he'd be unbearably bored until he was married off himself. He became preoccupied with the thought, so preoccupied that everything seemed to melt away. Even as he cut himself on the edge of the page.

Regulus had always been more sickly than Sirius. He had bandaged his finger himself, but the skin beneath it quickly flecked into yellow, then blue, and he was put into bed when his skin streaked itself into peeling black blotches. The King and Queen were aghast. The healers spoke in hushed tones. Sirius grabbed Regulus' hand to hold but was then thrown from the room. While the guards were sleeping like pigs that night, he emptied the satchel he had prepared to take when he ran away and uncovered his silver dagger. He pierced a hole through the wood of Regulus' door and opened it. He jumped into his brother’s bed and cradled him despite his protests. 

"You have to speak about me when I die," Regulus said hoarsely. "That means you will have to stay."

"Why would you say that?" said Sirius, even though he knew. "You’re not going to die."

Regulus laughed. But with control, never daunted despite his poor health. He let himself be held by his brother for the first in eternity since they were small. And Sirius, quivering from their reignited warmth, bit his lips in order not to weep. 

Long after Regulus had fallen asleep did Sirius notice an odd shadow of moonlight protruding from under the bed. Reluctantly he released his brother, climbed down, and grabbed the object from under the sheets. It was a book, and the edge of the pages was stained red where blood had spilt like a grotesque bookmark. He opened it to where the blood had run and held it up to the moonlight. It detailed a recipe, one that wasn't for a last meal to be made in the kitchens. It was for a dark bottle of elixir, a panacea from death.

Sirius stuck the book down his tunic and crept back to his own chambers. He re-packed his bag with food and water from the pantry and wrote a letter for Frank with a lie that he had gone hunting. He threw a cloak over his tunic and replaced his fine leather boots with scuffed rubber ones stolen from the head gardener. Armed with his dagger under moonlight, Sirius stepped through the mouth of the nearby woods and kept going. When the sun appeared through the leaves Sirius had just gathered the last of the herbs into a stone bowl. He was exhausted, out of water and desperately tired. The day was fairly new, and Frank would have just woken to his letter. Sirius sealed the bowl in his bag, crawled into the dark opening of a birch tree, curled up and told himself he would return when he woke. 

He had only meant to rest for a little while; afterwards he would race home and deliver the herbs and recipe to the healers. If he were in good fortune he would run into a gaggle of geese or a deer on the way and capture it to sustain his hunting story. He rather hoped that it would be a deer. Once Regulus was well he deserved all the venison there was. But when he awoke and crawled from the tree the world was an unfathomably starless dark. Sirius stared up at the black trees and couldn’t tell where the branches ended and the sky started. He had lost an entire day. He panicked as he picked up his satchel and hurried away.

Sirius ran for what seemed like ages, his bones aching and his spirit bruised from the weight of his task. He could only hope that Regulus was still alive when he made it back— best of luck he would be propped up in bed with his supper uneaten so Sirius could mix the elixir in his soup or sauce it with his chicken. His bag lugged with the weight of the stone bowl, incessantly bumping against his leg. 

He had long prided himself on knowing these woods well. He had been journeying in and out of them for years, even before plotting his getaway from his royally pained life. But every now so often he started to doubt himself as the trees’ branches folded criss-cross and haphazard like slaughtered veins. He suspected that he was continuously passing the same fork despite changing his routes. Sirius produced his dagger from his supplies, to which he used to carve the Canis Major, his namesake, into the trunk of the nearest tree, and changed his path yet again. 

A few moments later he came to a rest, stopped under a great tree, and found his carved constellation above his head.

Sirius flung his satchel to the ground, kicked it, and let out a long, frustrated shout. He craned his neck to the black pitch of night with his teeth and soul bared. His tears burned hot as they rolled down his cheeks and onto the dry soil of the forest. 

“Let me out!” he cried, angry at the world. “I need to get home!”

At his words a great wind rustled all around him. His long hair swept like bony fingers across his face. Sirius grabbed the folds of his cloak and pulled them over his chilled body, but watched intently. The branches eventually stopped reaching out and above; instead they curled, withered, into twisted knots of wood as they fell from where the sun finally shone again. 

Sirius stared up at it in disbelief. In a torrent of confusion but great relief, he gathered himself to his feet and brushed away the dark dirt from where he had sat. From the corner of his eyes a figure, the shadow of one, emerged from a tree in the distance. Sirius’ heart soared as he sprinted towards it. It must be a knight, the archers, or Frank, concerned of how long he had been hunting. 

He swallowed his disappointments when the light fell upon the figure. It belonged to a short, balding, pudgy man dressed in shabby robes. He hunched over, bearing a bundle of chopped wood in his arms, an overbite on his lips that made him resemble a large rat. But of all things he was a stranger, at best a woodcutter from the kingdom Sirius had hoped to flee from. The man regarded him with a watery gaze that Sirius tried most respectfully to return. 

“Pardon me,” Sirius said. “I fear that I’m lost.”

The man looked Sirius up and down. “Where are you going?” 

“The castle,” Sirius was relieved that he had foregone all his finery for his search of Regulus’ cure. “I work for the king, but I’ve lost my way. Do you know how to get there?”

The man went silent before hitching up his hold on his wood. “If I say I do, my liege,” he said with a smile almost wicked, “will you reward me for it?”

Sirius sighed. What had given him away? 

“It’s as clear as day, my liege,” the woodcutter said like he had seen into his thoughts. “Surely you can spare some of your riches for a poor woodsman.”

“Of course,” Sirius said, although he carried none of it with him. Though then he remembered his silver dagger, upholstered with a bejewelled coat of arms on the hilt. He began to take it out, but the woodcutter stopped him. 

“No,” he said, watery eyes now alight. “I want your hair.”

Sirius was taken aback. “What? Why?”

“I require a rope for my wood.”

Sirius bit his lip to stay civil with this man. He did not like to consider himself overly vain, but he did not particularly wish to part with his mane of fine black. Growing it out past his shoulders had been one of his rebellion’s proudest moments. 

“What if I gave you my dagger,” he offered. “It’s pure silver. You could sell it and never have to chop another stick of wood.”

“You can use it to cut off your hair,” came the reply. At Sirius’ recoil, he noisily dropped all his wood between them to make his point. “Wouldn’t you like to get home?”

Sirius exhaled, his courage never faltering. He thought of Regulus as he twisted his hair into a rope and drew his blade through where it met the nape of his neck. The woodcutter smiled as he took it and wound the fine black strands around the dead logs. 

“Now show me the way.” 

“Certainly, my liege.”

Another wind swirled the forest. Sirius’ cloak flew and shielded his face from sight, and when he had peeled it from his eyes the woodcutter had vanished. But on where he had stood had become a clear path, the trees pulled from the ground. Sirius smoothed the ends of his shorn hair as he made his way forward. 

By now he was sure he was on the right path. That had been no mere woodcutter. He had heard tales, told to him and Regulus as children by maids for bedtime, about the wise but greedy people of the woods. Now he told himself he must not disregard their odd requests, especially now that he was the one fulfilling them. 

It must’ve been hours before Sirius stopped to catch his breath again, but he was still deep in the woods. The sun above was sinking from white into a dark orange that looked almost red, and again he would be lost in the dark. Sirius knelt in the grass and prayed in his mind for someone to have mercy on him, mercy on his poor brother. He repeated it again and again after getting up and continuing. 

Proper dark settled on the woods before he had another glimmer of hope. A flash of white light, invincible and unmistakable, glinted at him from a mass of trees. The castle was known to glisten when rays of the moon hit the bulk block of it. Sirius dashed forwards eagerly until he was met with another sting of dismay. 

This next man had hair just as dark as he. He was as tall and almost handsome as he if not for the thick pair of bifocals that obscured his eyes. Sirius thought because of it this man could not possibly be of the woods, let alone a trickster fae. But what was he to do in this terrible, isolating darkness?

“Pardon me," he said bravely. "Do you know the way to the castle?”

The man turned to face him, and Sirius blanched. From his head sprouted, positively, two vast chthonic horns. But when Sirius stepped back and the man stepped forwards, the moon shone upon him and the horns were the antlers of a stag, majestic and cumbersome. The bizarre creature still stood at full height, the glare of his lenses pointed right at Sirius. 

“Do you know the way to the castle,” Sirius repeated, trying not to show fear. “I’m very lost.”

“What’s it to you?” the creature said. 

“I need to save someone there. Urgently. He’s my family.”

“Alright,” the creature said after a moment’s consideration. “But you will exchange something for it.”

“Of course.” Sirius swung his satchel behind his back. “What will you take?”

“Your name.”

This baffled him. “I’m not sure if that’s…”

“Oh, it very much is. It’s just something we call ourselves. We can change it and get rid of the one we have at any time, can’t we?”

Sirius agreed with a reluctant nod. “But I don’t understand. How will you take it?”

With a laugh the creature threw back his head, his antlers looking like thorns growing out of his messy bush of hair. “I already have!”

The prince was then engulfed by wind once more. His cloak whipped over his vision like a blindfold. And once again, once the gale settled, the creature and another patch of forest had been cleared into a path for him. The moon hung above his head like a great white beacon to a salvation only inches from his reach. 

Aeons passed. The prince walked and walked, kept alive by stumbling upon the occasional stream and consuming small rabbits he had slain with his dagger. His heart beat from fending off wolves one night and bears the next. The sun rose and shone and then sank so many times that he gave up counting them at some point. His boots had holes. His tunic was soaked with blood. His skin was caked with dirt and he had grown a matted beard equally soaked in the earth, though the hair on his head stayed as rough and short as the day he’d sliced it. The satchel he carried threatened to spill with a bloodstained book and a stone bowl full of herbs for a brother whose name had almost entirely escaped him. 

When his boots fell apart completely, he slumped onto the endless grass path and wailed. His energy sapped from lack of nourishment. The last syllable of his brother’s name slipped from his mind. But he couldn’t help but remember that he had still had a brother most of all, and he was dying and needed him. 

Or was he thinking about himself? 

From where he stood a wolf howled, as they did every full moon. The prince barely even considered his dagger. Somehow he hoped that the wolf would find his scent and follow him here. Filthy hands pressed to his eyes, the prince pleaded for the said powers above to end him. To take him away and shove him into the enfer. For the wolf, how many there were, to come eat him up. By now he was sure his brother was dead. He lay there and begged, eyes wide open, beseeching Death to arrive and that he would greet him with the warmest embrace and his head held high.

He waited. The wolves' cries came and went, but none of them discovered him. The prince was pleasantly stunned when Death finally appeared to him then as a beautiful young woman, clothed in a thin white dress and a long ream of red hair. He had distant memories of leafing through books that illustrated Death’s prominent hood and skull, but held to his promise, standing up to bow to her. 

“My lady,” he said, taking her hand in his grimy paws and kissing it. When she did not flinch he was ever more certain it was her. All people were equal in the eyes of Death. “At last you’ve come to take my life from me.”

The woman smiled warmly at him. But she shook her head. 

“You’re woefully mistaken,” she said, gently, and put her own hand over his. “I have sought you to give you something.”

The prince felt an emotion he hadn’t since a lifetime ago, but the word for it escaped him as well. He stared into her eyes, green as the coloured stones that decorated his dagger. 

“What is it, my lady?”

“What you were to have received since the beginning,” she patted his hand. “Your way home.”

Hope rekindled so easily in the prince's heart that he thought he would burst into flames. Though he wasn't sure if she meant heaven or his castle, he hoped that it would be one of them, and that this time she meant it. He wanted so badly to believe her. He gripped her hands as he attempted to keep himself upright. 

“Thank you,” he began, but not before she said:

“But first, I require something from you.”

“I have nothing left to give,” the prince said brokenly. “I don’t even have a name. I have no possessions of any use. What on earth could you want from me?”

“Your humanity,” she said. “That is what you have left.”

The prince, though dazed and even more half-sure of what she meant, agreed with a single nod of his head. From another distant memory he then shut his eyes, and this time he felt his cloak shroud his whole body like a dark veil. He felt himself seeing yet blind, felt himself growing smaller yet bigger, breathing and not breathing all at once. 

When the wind died the turrets of his castle shone bright white above the thicket in front of him. But that isn’t all. 

He, Sirius, has been fully restored. His long hair billows behind him on the ghosts of the gust. His cloak, tunic, boots and skin are unmuddied and clean as the day he’d ventured into the woods. He opens up his satchel and his herbs are overpowering with fragrance and freshness in his stone bowl. 

Sirius cries out in joy as he races forwards, through the mouth of the forest, the world, and back to his home. But as he draws nearer his heart skips an orchestra of beats under his unsullied tunic. His castle is now grey, up close, and the once rumoured bone of the edifice is cracked and coarse and crumbled to pieces in the grass. Sirius’ lip quivers. It was unquestionable that everything but him was dead. 

Sirius drops his satchel, uncaring of the herbs that nearly spill from its top. He howls at his desolate home with all the rage in him, falling to his hands and knees from the force it takes. He screams as his very heart threatens to rupture in his chest, clawing at the grass until blood freshly blooms from his fingers once more. He beats himself up with the heels of his boots, kicking himself and bruising the ground he stood on in the most hellish of fits. His bones ache but he lets them crack; his knuckles crumple but he curls them into weapons.

And he barely hears the similar beastly howl that roars from behind him just then, from the forest. He whirls around in anger, stripping off all of his clothes before hunching onto all fours and howling right back. He howls for all that he had done, parents who had tried to be rid of him, and a dear brother that he now knew was long dead. He had really dared to die while Sirius was away. 

“Regulus!” Sirius screeches so deep and raw. “Fuck you!”

Upon his curse, a dark figure leaps from the mouth of the woods. Sirius’ snarl dies on his lips as the wolf leaps upon him and sends them both crashing through the stained glass on the bottommost of the castle, keening on him with its canines bared and paws furry with its own blood. 

Sirius burns with rage. The outside world still challenges him even after he’s reached his home. The wolf swipes at his face like a slap before plunging the other down on his throat, and the scratches it leaves tear angrier hisses from Sirius’ teeth. He kicks at its throat and lean stomach to no avail, his bare prince’s feet no match for the furred beast. He palms the glass shards around him for one big enough to grab, but they all fall weak and thin and Sirius barely tumbles away from the wolf before it can wound him again. 

He throws himself out the next window and crawls to his satchel in the grass, the lid already opened in a scream. The wolf follows, eyes glossed over with hunger, and sprung itself squarely atop of Sirius’ naked belly with its claws. Sirius releases a bark of pain as he thrusts his silver dagger into its muscled chest and twists. 

The wolf does not howl. It chokes pitifully, burbling, unable to gulp because of the blade lodged in its lung. Sirius is so angry he could drag it right across and open its heart but he doesn’t, gasping as the wolf above him shrivels and wilts into a man. A man as bare as the day he was born, scarred and toes furled, dark blood raining from his chest onto Sirius’. His eyes fly open and he is as pure a human as Sirius has seen in a real, horrible eternity.

Perhaps it is his desperate rush at seeing a living human again, or that Sirius was raised a prince, after all. Even if he had given away his humanity it was no excuse to discard his chivalry. Sirius tries hard not to budge the blade as he slings his satchel to pick the man up and carry him into the castle. 

The rooms are dark and old and cobwebbed with gossamer. The portraits lining the stairs have been burnt. Every now and then Sirius steps in blots of blood that are neither his nor his new friends’, but he knows what he has to do. He locates Regulus’ old room, the door with a dagger hole, and puts his friend in his brother’s bed. He begins sponging up the worst of the blood with the sheets.

“Don’t,” his friend croaks. “I should die.”

“Hush,” Sirius says. “I know how to cure you.”

“No, you don’t!”

“I can let you live! Don’t you dare pull it out!”

The moon sinks into a burst of yellow light as the man clenches his jaws and fists around the dusty sheets. Sirius sets himself up on the floor, consulting Regulus’ long-bloodied book for his deathless elixir, the potion that was now going to his friend. Instead of a pestle he cracks the seeds with the bottom of the stone bowl, serrates the leaves with his hands. 

It takes two nights for his concoction to work. 

And a whole week for Remus, he’s learnt, to be able to get out of bed. “It gets worse as I grow older,” he says and looks Sirius up and down one night after he’s tended to his wounds and unearthed a china set and a rusty tin of Assam from what used to be the pantry. But what he takes is far more benign.

“Say, you never told me how old you were.”

“I don’t know,” Sirius answers, pouring them cups of ancient tea. “I was away on my own for a long time. How old do you think I look?”

Remus contemplates carefully. “Thirty.”

Sirius isn’t sure what to think of this. He has nothing to base this on, shying away from the mirror ever since he and Remus found a way to pump water into the old tub. It helps that Remus isn’t very fond of his reflection either. He had made no comments when Sirius smashed the mirrors into stars a few nights ago. 

But then Sirius decides to smile. If he was in fact thirty, he was doing much better than how he’d envisioned his princely self at that age had it not been for his venture into the world outside. He relays this to Remus bashfully, almost overfilling their cups as he does. 

“This is better?” Remus questions, somewhat amused. “Drinking tea with a sick werewolf in your brother’s old bedroom?”

“Of course. I delight in your company. Otherwise, I probably would’ve been married off.”

“Oh. I always forget you’re a prince.”

Though Remus never forgets to treat him as such, Sirius realises, with the reverence he gives him every time he walks into the room. Remus would sink into bows as deep as he could before Sirius released him, telling him to watch his wound. He grew guilty and despondent on seeing the marks he himself had slashed into Sirius’ neck.

“It’s fine,” Sirius whispers into the lull some days before the next full moon, the one thing he’s sure of. He sees no need to keep dates any longer, not when he charts the sun and moon rising and falling while curled up next to Remus. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“I could’ve taken your head off,” comes the reply.

“And I could’ve cut out your heart.” Sirius says, contradictorily caressing the sides of his body. Remus is pins and needles these nights and passes it to him in tow, but holding each other like this, breath to breath, never fails to soothe. 

“Sorry,” Remus stifles a laugh. “We both could’ve died.”

“Well, I’m glad we didn’t.” Sirius leans into his muscled chest, where the gash from the dagger is another closed scar. “Death is very strange, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw her. And yes, she’s a woman.”

“How do you… know it was her?” Remus’ hand cups Sirius’ face like he’s checking for her traces. “You’re not dead.”

“I didn't give her my life,” he sighed. “I gave her something else.”

“Oh?” 

“I don’t know if it’s really going to matter that much, though. I don’t feel much different.” He sighed again as Remus gently tilted his chin upwards and pressed his lips to his brow. “I bet my brother would know.”

Regulus would not have expected Sirius’ metamorphosis. When Remus awoke next to his sleeping prince he discovered him turned into a dog, black as his hair. But to Remus it was only prosperity. Now the kingdom was truly theirs. 


End file.
